NLP for Conversations:

Presenters:

• Gabriel Murray (University of the Fraser Valley, Canada)
• Giuseppe Carenini (University of British Columbia, Canada)
• Shafiq Joty (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Tutorial Outline:

1. Introduction: Tasks, Challenges, Applications, and Corpora (PDF slides)

• Types of conversational data
• Challenges of conversational data

2. Conversation Structure (PDF slides)

• Synchronous vs. asynchronous conversations
• Dialogue acts & adjacency pairs
• Disentanglement & thread reconstruction
• Role detection
• Treating disfluencies

3. Summarization and Sentiment (PDF slides)

• Abstraction vs. extraction
• Summarization vs. compression
• Topic modelling and sentiment analysis
• Summarization methods (traditional and neural)
• Interactive visual summaries
• Evaluating automatic summarization

4. Group Dynamics and NLP (PDF slides)

• Group communication and turn-taking
• Predicting group task performance
• Measuring participant satisfaction
• Social network analysis & NLP
• NLP & group conflict

5. Conclusions and Future Directions